THE ECONOMIST: Elon Musk gives future-gazing vision for humanity — but should we listen to his predictions?

Elon Musk, in his telling, is a modern-day Cassandra — better than most at predicting the future, but doomed to be disbelieved.

“People don’t realise that what I’m saying will come to pass,” he tells The Economist in a 90-minute interview for The Insider, held at a giant Tesla factory in Texas where electric cars drive themselves off the assembly line.

That may be because his future-gazing ranges from the unsettling to the downright weird.

Mr Musk predicts that, within five years, artificial-intelligence systems may surpass the sum of all human intelligence.

Within 10 years, robots in the workplace will help usher in an era of such “amazing abundance” that money will become meaningless.

And within 20 years, Britain — a country that he has not visited for years — will be engulfed in civil war.

Believe them or not, the predictions of Mr Musk, who last month briefly became the world’s first trillionaire, are worth taking seriously.

The driving force behind Tesla and SpaceX, a rocket-maker turned AI conglomerate, is doing more than any entrepreneur to shape the future.

His influence — powered by money and feats of engineering genius — stretches from the White House to global trouble spots such as Ukraine.

With 240 million followers on X, his social-media platform, Mr Musk’s views, especially those that are divisive, have significant repercussions.

Dressed in black boots and a leather jacket with the logo of Grok, his chatbot, on the back, he showed flashes of the steely single-mindedness that helped him pioneer the mass-production of electric vehicles and send reusable rockets into space against all odds.

He also showed how bent on shaping his own reality he is, to the point of intransigence on matters outside his sphere of expertise.

It was Mr Musk’s first extended interview since the public listing of SpaceX, which soared to a value of $2.6 trillion in the days after trading began but has since plunged to $1.6 trillion, a fifth below what it first traded at.

The main topic of conversation was AI. It is a technology, he says, that can move him from “exhilaration to terror” in a single day.

For now, his “philosophical conclusion” is to “look on the bright side”.

It is a choice that conveniently serves his own interests. Mr Musk believes that AI systems and robots will eventually handle most digital and physical jobs, rendering work by humans “optional”.

To that end, xAI (now called SpaceXAI) is developing systems to perform cognitive tasks such as software programming while Tesla is manufacturing humanoids.

Mr Musk plans to power the whole AI caboodle with data centres in space.

Without jobs, he suggests there may need to be large-scale wealth redistribution to create “universal high income” for humans.

But although the world’s richest man says he is fine to pay “trillions in tax”, he also argues that money will be irrelevant a decade from now.

Thus he argues that governments should simply “issue people cheques”, because amid an infinite supply of goods and services produced by machines, deflation will be a bigger problem than inflation.

Mr Musk acknowledges there are imminent risks from increasingly powerful AI systems.

Noting that the capabilities of frontier models are improving rapidly, he elaborates on a recent proposal by Sir Demis Hassabis, co-founder of Google DeepMind, for America’s government to set up a self-regulatory body via which the industry would test its own models for dangers.

Mr Musk argues that the effort should be extended to China, and that leading AI labs, including Chinese ones, should have a week or two to inspect each other’s latest models before release, flagging any risks to governments in both Washington and Beijing.

“The competitors can keep each other honest.”

He goes so far as to suggest that, in order to keep models safe, he may even be prepared to bury the hatchet with Sam Altman, boss of OpenAI, with whom he has fought a losing battle in court over recriminations stemming from the days when they co-founded the AI lab together.

“At the end of the day, if we have to talk, we’ll talk,” he says, adding that both men might need to “set aside our personal differences for the good of the world”.

Mr Musk seems much less worried about the rise of Chinese labs than other AI bosses, such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei.

He is impressed by new releases like Kimi K3, unveiled this month by Moonshot AI, and reckons there is a “good chance” that Chinese AI firms will become “the leaders at some point”, pointing to the country’s electricity supply, which vastly exceeds America’s, and its ability to churn out robots.

(He adds that he finds videos of Chinese robots knocking each other’s heads off “pretty funny”.)

Mr Musk opposes efforts by some officials in the Trump administration to ban American companies from using Chinese models, saying it would not do much to stop their makers from winning the AI race.

He expects China eventually to overcome its shortage of cutting-edge chips, the result of American export restrictions, by creating its own lithography machines, the absence of which currently prevents it from manufacturing sufficient quantities of high-end processors.

Currently ASML, a Dutch firm, holds a monopoly on the sale of the most advanced class of lithography tools, and is barred from selling them to America’s superpower rival. But China is “closer than most people realise to solving the lithography problem,” says Mr Musk.

The serial entrepreneur is unabashed about the amount of power he wields.

He contends that AI will control almost everything eventually, and that his dominance of SpaceX, where he holds more than 80 per cent of the voting shares, is aimed at ensuring that its long-term goal of turning humanity into a multi-planetary species with a colony on Mars is achieved, even if it depresses short-term profits.

As for his sway over American politics, where his money and influence helped return President Donald Trump to power in 2025 (and briefly put Mr Musk in charge of gutting the federal bureaucracy), he says he became too involved.

“I got carried away, frankly.”

Still, he shows no sign of relinquishing the geopolitical bully pulpit.

Although SpaceX’s Starlink satellites, which provide internet connectivity in remote places, have been used to help Ukraine counter Russia’s invasion, Mr Musk remains adamant that any peace deal should offer territorial concessions to the aggressor.

He describes the media’s characterisation of Europe’s far-right as “false, misleading and nonsense”, and argues that it is made up of “normal people” seeking safe cities, secure borders and sensible spending.

His jeremiads about civil war in Britain stem from a view that an influx of people whose ideas are “antithetical to Western beliefs” will lead to a reckoning.

Asked if he is anti-Muslim, he replies: “I’m against rape and murder. I’m against the imposition of rules and laws that are contrary to what we’ve come to accept in the West, and it’s a crying shame that traditional media, like you, don’t recognise this.”

It is unclear how his dark vision of the future outside America fits with his AI utopianism. But even Mr Musk wonders if it all makes sense.

At times, he says, he believes in a theory in which the universe is a computer simulation created by aliens.

“The things I’m doing are so preposterous that it’s hard to believe they’re real.”